Page 37
Submitting Your Draft Gainful Employment Debt-to-Earnings Challenges Webinar
October 20, 2016
Amber Johnson: Good afternoon again, everyone, and welcome back to today’s webinar. We are joined into today’s webinar which is titled Submitting Your Draft Gainful Employment Debt-to-Earnings Challenges Webinar. My name is Amber Johnson. And I will be your moderator.
Today’s webinar will be conducted in listen-only mode. If you have questions during the webinar, please click on the Q&A pod located on the left-hand side of your screen. Click in the blank field, type your question, and then send your question. Please remember to include the slide number with your question. Questions will be held until the end of the presentation where Cynthia Hammond and Oliver Dolan will read them to our presenters for a response.
If you want to download a copy of the slide, please select the document located in the Files pod. Once selected, click Download File, and follow the directions to save the file. Now, I will turn it over to Cynthia Hammond to begin today’s webinar.
Cynthia Hammond: Thank you, Amber. And thank you all for joining us and for your patience as we dealt with the sound issue. I hope we’re coming in loud and clear now. As many of you know, there was an Electronic Announcement posted earlier today which lets you know that the rate letters and backup details were put in your SAIG mailboxes last night and into this morning.
We will announce very soon when the 45-day window will start, and more importantly, when it will end. If you missed yesterday’s webinar on how to read the backup details, we will be doing it again next Tuesday. It is also being - it was recorded and will be recorded again next Tuesday. And we will post those to IFAP as soon as we can.
Today’s webinar on how to submit a draft Debt-to-Earnings challenge is also being recorded. And if you’re not able to stay with us through the full hour and a half today, we also will be doing this webinar next Thursday as well. And with that, I’m going to turn it over to Erik Melis to start on our webinar.
Erik Melis: Thank you, Cynthia, and good afternoon, everyone. We’re going to have an interesting conversation this afternoon about submitting your draft Gainful Employment Debt-to-Earnings challenges.
What we’re going to talk about in just a second is the process for both viewing and submitting those challenges. I do want to address some questions that we’ve gotten, just to sort of head off additional questions that we’re looking into. We’ve gotten word from several people that the file that they received under message class name GEDMBYOP, as opposed to the GELFEOP? I think I left out a letter on that one, but that’s close enough. The GELFL - no, I’m sorry, the GEBFLEOP.
If you received the other one, the GEDMBYOP, that should still contain the data for your backup file. But we are trying to find out right now what the issue is with the message class name. So we’re aware of that. We’re checking on it. It should still be the correct file. But we are looking at that. And we’ll let you know if we have a resolution or an answer prior to the end of the call.
So, moving forward, on today’s webinar, we’re going to be talking about where we are in the GE process. We’re going to be talking about how to receive and request your Gainful Employment Debt-to-Earnings backup detail file - backup detail report.
We will review the NSLDS screens for functionality for being able to view your NSLDS Debt-to-Earnings backup data, which will include showing you the page that lists those students in the program, as well as being able to update for a challenge, and then, the final process which will be to actually submit the challenges to FSA for consideration and adjudication.
So where we are in the GE process, we’ve gone through the Draft Completers List and the Completers List corrections process. Those corrections that were submitted were adjudicated. And then, a final Gainful Employment Completers List was generated. That was also sent to the Social Security Administration, and earnings for those programs were retrieved from Social Security.
Those earnings are used as part of the Debt-to-Earnings calculations. You are also provided that earnings data via a separate message class to your SAIG mailboxes. So the next pieces that we’re working on now are the actual rates, which we had a webinar on how to read your rates on Tuesday.
Today, we’re going to talk about how to both read your rates on NSLDS, as well as submit potential challenges. And then, we still have, following this, after the challenge period has ended, those challenges will be adjudicated, and final rates will be published. And at that point, the window of opportunity opens for potential alternate earnings appeals.
So, the draft Debt-to-Earnings rates and the associated letter identifying the rates were sent out starting last night. It is a lot of data; a lot of backup files. So it is possible, just because of the volume, that although we started those last night, some of you may not have yet received them or may have received, for example, the letter file but not the detail file. Those are in process of being put out there. So you should have those shortly.
And again, they should be in message classes, as identified on the slide there; the GELFLEOP for the letter and the GEBFLEOP for the backup detail. Now these are sent to the SAIG mailbox that’s associated with the Batch Gainful Employment Notification function that you signed up for via FSA Web Enroll. So make sure that you’re checking the right mailbox when you’re looking at that. The file layout for the backup detail is contained in the NSLDS Gainful Employment Users Guide. And it is in Appendix D. So you want to refer to that.
You can also request an additional copy, or if you ultimately don’t receive it, you can request a copy of the backup detail, either for the entire calculation year or by individual programs, via the NSLDS Professional Access website. And as we’ve talked about yesterday, the way you request those is either through the Reports tab on the NSLDS website, or you’d go to the Gainful Employment Rates listing on the Org tab. And then, you can access the By Program Report on the Org tab, or you can actually go to the Report tab.
Those will be sent to whichever SAIG mailbox is associated with the user who requested the report, as opposed to the pushed file which goes to the FSA Web Enroll Signup SAIG mailbox. Those reports are also sent to you via the same message class as the backup detail; that is, the GEBFLEOP; and again, it uses the same file layout as the pushed file, which is in Appendix D of the User Guide.
Now, we’re going to talk about how to look at your detail online, and then use the NSLDS website to actually be able to submit a challenge request for Debt-to-Earnings. So what you’ll do is you’ll log into NSLDS, the Professional Access website, and you’ll go to the GE tab.
On the GE tab, you will see two links that are associated with Debt-to-Earnings. One is the GE D/E List, the Debt-to-Earnings List, which will take you both to the List page, as well as the Update page. Those are the pages that you’ll use to view the people that are associated with your Debt-to-Earnings calculations, as well as submit potential challenges to the debt detail that’s provided on the Update page.
Once all of your challengers or potential challenges have been entered into the system, you’ll need to go through a final submit process, which is what the Submit Draft GE D/E link is for. And we’ll talk about that as we go through the screen. That’s the last process. That’s the part that actually submits your challenges to FSA for consideration and adjudication.
By default, when you go to the GE tab, it brings up the Gainful Employment Debt-to-Earnings List page. So that first page is automatically displayed. You’ll see that in the title there above the Parameters box. When you’re on this page, you have the ability to sort your results in a couple of different ways, either by last name, first name, or by SSN. The default is SSN. So if you don’t enter any other value, if you just leave it the way it is, the page will be sorted by SSN.
You also have the ability to filter or display subsets of your overall data by entering a specific zip code; credential level. You can enter a specific rate type, whether draft or final - I’m sorry, draft or transitional. As we mentioned, during a webinar on Tuesday, transitional rates are calculated for programs that have non-passing rates for the regular annual Debt-to-Earnings and the regular discretionary Debt-to-Earnings rates, if there are sufficient completers in the transitional year cohort.
You can also enter a specific student SSN, and it will find the data associated with that one student. And you can also select records that have either been edited or records that have not been edited or display them all. This selection here, the Edit status is very important when you get ready to do your final submission process. And we’ll come back and talk about that when we get to that part of the discussion.
Once you have entered your Sort parameters, once you’ve entered your Display parameters, you will click Retrieve. And what you will get is a listing of all the people associated with those parameters that are part of your institutional or institution’s draft Gainful Employment Debt-to-Earnings rates.
Each record has two sections associated with it or each student will have two sections associated with them. The first is the Student Identifiers. And it will contain the student’s Social Security number, their name, the date of birth and the indicator of the rate type; in this case, showing that it’s a draft rate.
The second row will show you the information related to the GE program for which this student is part of, the draft Debt-to-Earnings calculations tells you the zip code, the program name, the credentials and the student ID, and that is the five-character alphanumeric student ID that NSLDS uses to tie GE records together. This is the only place that you’ll see, or that you’ll actually use the Social Security number in addition to the student ID to link a student together.
If you click then on the blue Active button, you will bring up the Gainful Employment Debt-to-Earnings Update page associated with that student. The first block on the Update page contains the same information as what you’d look at on the actual List page. So you’ll have the student’s SSN, and the name and the date of birth, the GE student ID, as well as the program identifier, CIP, credential level, and the school name.
Below that, on the page, you will have information related to the GE program that that student has for the GE records associated with that GE program for this particular student. It will show you the GE record. And that ID is the GE record ID. Although it looks a lot like the student ID, it is slightly different.
One thing to remind you, on these student IDs and the GE record IDs, and ultimately, on the loan IDs that NSLDS uses to identify these GE records, they are unique within a specific CIP-credential level combination. So the first student in a particular program will be identified as 00AAA. And then, the first student in another program, a different program, a different CIP and credential level, will also be identified as 00AAA. So that identifier is unique only within that program. So if you want to refer to a specific student, you have to use all those pieces; CIP, credential level and the ID.
On the Loan Record section, you will see the loan ID. Again, that’s the NSLDS loan ID. And where this is important, as Margaret will talk about in a little while, when you’re actually submitting your, or putting together your challenges and submitting the comments, these IDs that we’re referring to are very important because that’s how we’re going to be able to link your submitted challenges back to the records that need to be reviewed. Okay.
The Loan Record will show you the date of the loan, the loan type, the indicator of a separate loan, as well as the school location for which this loan was made. It will show you servicer contact information, and we provide as much as we can. So we provide both the federal loan servicer and the lender servicer - or GA in the case of FFEL loans. But we will provide as much of that as we can. And then, we will also provide the data provider/award ID for that particular loan.
And then, most importantly, we provide you with the period of a loan, both the loan period begin date and the loan period end date, the loan amount, the cancellation amount, the refund amount, and the loan debt, which is the net calculation of loan amount minus cancellation minus refund. These are the items, as Margaret is going to talk about, that are challengeable as part of this process.
So if you find, for example on this particular case, that this loan should have had, based on the records that you’re able to produce and provide, a $500 cancellation amount, then what you would do - and I’m sorry, I jumped ahead one slide. I’ll jump ahead anyway. So I jumped ahead one slide. So if you’re making that update to the cancellation amount, you would enter the $500 in the cancellation field. And then, you would submit with appropriate comments. And that would then set up this record as a challenge record.
Going back, just a second, since I did skip that slide, and I want to point this out. If the student has multiple GE records associated with the program, then you will see multiple entries on the Update page, and they’re separated by a gap. So when you see that, when you pull up a student’s detail records in the Update page, and you see that gap in there between sets of loan records, that’s because that’s another GE program associated - or another GE record for the student associated with that program.